I'm confused as to why Skeletons cannot have fighter levels. Wouldn't you just use the Adding Class Levels part of the monster advancement rules?

Skeletons are mindless, and thus unable to have class levels. Skeletal champions (essentially intelligent, sentient skeletons) can, and often do, have class levels. It's a minor distinction, really; the fact that this and the ghost thing were the most glaring issues with the proposal is testimony to how airtight it is. I wish I had this degree of raw talent, to come up with something so ridiculously tight on my first freakin' try!!! Hats off to you, m'lady, and bravo on a magnificent performance this whole season!

Thank you for the explanation, I have been at work all weekend and just rolled in to add my 2 coppers!

Thank you, you have been wonderful and I wish you all the very best.

I ended up finding the information in the Monster Roles section. Like most of the books, the organization leaves a lot to be desired and important information such as this can easily be missed.

What is causing the extreme crushing pressures? If you are swimming in it near surface, you'd be exposed to close to atmospheric pressure or hydrostatic pressures similar to what you'd encounter in water. If you are swimming down a volcanic pipe to great depths in the planet, then the crushing pressures would come up.

I'm with Lemmy here. I like lots of options and have purchased lots of Paizo material and oodles of 3pp options (shoutout to Interjection Games, Rogue Genius Games, Aluria Publishing, and many others). What I object to are the inclusion of non-options or poorly balanced options that won't be used by either the GMs or players due to their mechanical failings and being options that either get passed over every time due to the opportunity cost of selecting that option, or have a disruptive effect on the game out of scale of what another option with a similar opportunity cost might have.

I always welcome more quality product that makes me want to introduce it to my game. I'd prefer it if the books were shorter rather than including more filler, uninspiring, or non-options.

I've had a chance to look through this in more depth and I continue to be impressed. This is a $30+ sourcebook full of ideas and a very fun sword and planets space-opera style setting and rules to run it. It would be a shame if more people didn't take the chance to check it out. I keep on coming back to how well this would let you play a Star Ocean, Xenogears, or other planetary romance-style games.

Thanks for the review Endzeitgeist. This sounds like a really cool fusion of sci-fi and fantasy that reminds me a bit of the Star Ocean or Xenosaga series of games in how it blends fantasy with space opera. You can't beat the price either.

Geisha's inspire ability was originally supposed to last longer (an hour, I think), but someone else felt that was too long and reduced it to 10 minutes. Which makes the ability kinda pointless, honestly.

@Sean: I really appreciate the insights into the design process. I was always confused by the discrepancies between some of the things you'd written about design methodology/recommendations the design approaches taken in a number of Paizo works which seemed to go against what you'd written. In retrospect, it makes a lot more sense that the different cooks in the kitchen would have different opinions on matters, but with you being the public face for many rule/mechanics issue and a very fierce arguer on their behalf it was hard at times to keep that distinction in my mind.

I posted in another thread, but my thoughts on the matter is that while the immunities seem to be fairly impressive things that other classes cannot do, they also tend to be highly overvalued. Yes, it might mean that the Goadaikishi is strong against other elemental users, but they are still susceptible to a broad range of other effects. This puts them in the Paladin range of defenses, which while strong is not unbeatable.

My bigger concern is the capstone ability of the Wokou which seems to be extremely weak. Then again, capstones don't come up all that often so it won't have a huge in-game impact.

I picked up my copy of Celadon Shores and it is another top quality product. I haven't looked through the whole pdf yet, but I am really liking the Godaikishi, which appears to be a elemental knight class that just oozes awesomeness. It has some powerful abilities that do things other classes can't, but it still feels balanced with a Paladin.

The Wokou didn't amaze me at first, but I'm coming around to the Fighter + Companion class combo after further reflection. The level 20 capstone is pretty underwhelming, but since capstones come into play so rarely, I'm not all that concerned. The menacing moniker from Intimidating Presence made me smile.

So, I was interested in seeing what the bestiary had to say with regards to the zombies and skeletons and it appears they say different things

PRD, Skeletons wrote:

Skeletons are the animated bones of the dead, brought to unlife through foul magic. While most skeletons are mindless automatons, they still possess an evil cunning imparted to them by their animating force—a cunning that allows them to wield weapons and wear armor.

So the evil cunning lets them use weapons and armor, but doesn't spell out anything else it might do.

I'll also note that the alignment is listed as Neutral Evil and there is no mention about "Always" or other frequency. All I can find on Alignment is from the intro section which says

PRD, Bestiary Intro wrote:

Alignment, Size, and Type: While a monster's size and type remain constant (unless changed by the application of templates or other unusual modifiers), alignment is far more fluid. The alignments listed for each monster in this book represent the norm for those monsters—they can vary as you require them to in order to serve the needs of your campaign. Only in the case of relatively unintelligent monsters (creatures with an Intelligence of 2 or lower are almost never anything other than neutral) and planar monsters (outsiders with alignments other than those listed are unusual and typically outcasts from their kind) is the listed alignment relatively unchangeable.

Which seems to support that low intelligence/mindless creatures are generally neutral, while aligned outsiders generally fixed and the rest of the monsters can vary to a greater degree.

Now, I do think that there is some point regarding zombies and their innate unneighbourly behaviour.

PRD, Zombie wrote:

Zombies are the animated corpses of dead creatures, forced into foul unlife via necromantic magic like animate dead. While the most commonly encountered zombies are slow and tough, others possess a variety of traits, allowing them to

...

Thanks for the pointer. I missed that in the bestiary entry since it shows up in the template portion and not in the monster's statblock.

So, I was interested in seeing what the bestiary had to say with regards to the zombies and skeletons and it appears they say different things

PRD, Skeletons wrote:

Skeletons are the animated bones of the dead, brought to unlife through foul magic. While most skeletons are mindless automatons, they still possess an evil cunning imparted to them by their animating force—a cunning that allows them to wield weapons and wear armor.

So the evil cunning lets them use weapons and armor, but doesn't spell out anything else it might do.

I'll also note that the alignment is listed as Neutral Evil and there is no mention about "Always" or other frequency. All I can find on Alignment is from the intro section which says

PRD, Bestiary Intro wrote:

Alignment, Size, and Type: While a monster's size and type remain constant (unless changed by the application of templates or other unusual modifiers), alignment is far more fluid. The alignments listed for each monster in this book represent the norm for those monsters—they can vary as you require them to in order to serve the needs of your campaign. Only in the case of relatively unintelligent monsters (creatures with an Intelligence of 2 or lower are almost never anything other than neutral) and planar monsters (outsiders with alignments other than those listed are unusual and typically outcasts from their kind) is the listed alignment relatively unchangeable.

Which seems to support that low intelligence/mindless creatures are generally neutral, while aligned outsiders generally fixed and the rest of the monsters can vary to a greater degree.

Now, I do think that there is some point regarding zombies and their innate unneighbourly behaviour.

PRD, Zombie wrote:

Zombies are the animated corpses of dead creatures, forced into foul unlife via necromantic magic like animate dead. While the most commonly encountered zombies are slow and tough, others possess a variety of traits, allowing them to spread disease or move with increased speed.

Zombies are unthinking automatons, and can do little more than follow orders. When left unattended, zombies tend to mill about in search of living creatures to slaughter and devour. Zombies attack until destroyed, having no regard for their own safety.

Although capable of following orders, zombies are more often unleashed into an area with no command other than to kill living creatures. As a result, zombies are often encountered in packs, wandering around places the living frequent, looking for victims. Most zombies are created using animate dead. Such zombies are always of the standard type, unless the creator also casts haste or remove paralysis to create fast zombies, or contagion to create plague zombies.

This seems to say that these guys, while mindless are also not exactly the best neighbours to have around. Think Leningen Versus the Ants with zombies taking the role of the army ants.

I notice that there seems to be versions 1 through V for all the psychic spells. I'd like to suggest that it might save space and simplify things to just have a single version of each spell with varying effects depending on which spell slot the spell is prepared in.

From the responses to my earlier message, it appears I failed in my communication. I was not bemoaning the inability to use a 3rd party product in Pathfinder Society, or for Paizo to adopt 3rd party products under their own banner, or even that the psychic magic is a rip-off/inferior product to Dreamscarred's psionics. Those are all things I was not attempting to say.

Instead, I was bemoaning that Paizo will frequently re-invent the wheel when a particular topic has already been done by another company to very good effect. And I'm not even all that bothered by that behaviour (although it might be nice to take full advantage of the excellent work of others and use the OGL to refine/polish an idea from time to time). I understand that different designers will have different takes on how best to implement a specific concept.

What disappoints me, is how often it appears that Paizo's developers/writers have not even done any investigation or learned from others who have already attempted to create something for the same topic. One example of this is the Medium which attempts to fill the same niche as the Occultist or some of the archetypes from Radiance House's Pact Magic series, but ends up being a much clunkier version with a number of ambiguities with respect to the influence system and the nature of the spirits which is handled more elegantly in Radiance House's books.

Now, you can agree or disagree with my assessment, but the point I wished to communicate is that I am disappointed that Paizo almost never takes advantage of the work of others as either a useful system/mechanic to use as-is, or as a useful example to draw inspiration from and learn lessons from.

It could be that my expectations are too high, but it's still disappointing to see when 3rd Party publishers seem to be able to make it work amongst each other, but Paizo cannot. I could understand if it was something that schedule constraints prevented from happening, except it frequently occurs with products that have been out for years. My expectations probably comes from my background, where doing a basic literature/case-study search is the first step in any project and this only rarely seems to be the case in the table-top RPG business.

I've never been able to understand why Paizo designs as though 3pp does not exist, and will frequently create something that has already been done by a high-profile 3pp and still manage to create something inferior to the already available 3pp offering. I mean, I can understand wanting to create your own interpretation on something rather than just using the OGL to reprint the content, but you'd think Paizo would at least take a look at what has already been done well and take lessons from that.

First off, these questions should be asked for the major level ranges (feel free to modify slightly).

Journeyman: 1-5
Heroic: 6-10
Champion: 11-15
Demi-god: 16-20

And on to the questions:

Can the class contribute meaningfully in:

1. Combat - This includes level appropriate:

a. defenses against physical and magical attacks
b. offensive capability; or
c. a way of enhancing party members such that they would realistically choose to have you accompany them
d. ability to engage with the threats in the environments you can expect to be fighting in for that level.

The 5 areas don't all need to be filled, but the class should be able to participate or have decent options for participating or contributing meaningfully in all categories without crippling themselves in other categories.

First off, these questions should be asked for the major level ranges (feel free to modify slightly).

Journeyman: 1-5
Heroic: 6-10
Champion: 11-15
Demi-god: 16-20

And on to the questions:

Can the class contribute meaningfully in:

1. Combat - This includes level appropriate:

a. defenses against physical and magical attacks
b. offensive capability; or
c. a way of enhancing party members such that they would realistically choose to have you accompany them
d. ability to engage with the threats in the environments you can expect to be fighting in for that level.

Feel free to debate or add other requirements you might use when evaluating a class. I've found using this type of checklist helps me avoid hyper-focusing on one area and entirely missing the fact that the class is going to end up sitting out large portions of the game in which they cannot meaningfully contribute.

Does technology not work in Golarion/Pathfinder though? Why, with civilizations as old as they have been presented in Pathfinder, has there been so little development? The exclusive/limited list argument works for magic, but not for the setting's development in other areas. In fact, the exculsiveness of magic to a small portion of the population would seem to encourage the non-magical to find alternate paths of development even more.

It also ignores that the demographics/examples as shown in the modules and adventure paths tends to make magic a lot more prevalent than is indicated in many of these discussions.

This is a related thing, but I have to ponder: what are the conditions supposed to be on any given world where magic could flow in abundance or be completely non-existent? Earth, for example, had a period in its history, long long ago, where magic was at least as common as it was on Golarion, but by the present day it is all but extinct. You also have the culture that created the starship that crashed in Numeria. As far as we know, the Androffans were completely unaware of magic (given the reaction robots give to spellcasters in Iron Gods).

Which leads me to another train of thought: does magic actually hinder a civilization in terms of technological and, perhaps, cultural progress? See it like this:

Golarion: its history is bathed in magic, from mighty spellcasters to arcane and divine scars on the land. Most of Golarion is largely in a pre-industrial age, even if socio-economic conditions are somewhat better than it was in Medieval times in Europe. Still, most of it is dominated by monarchies or theocracies and slavery is legal or at least accepted in much of the Inner Sea region, even if it is frowned upon by many people.

Earth: Magic was once a powerful force but has vanished. Advances in technology by World War I is light years ahead of what most of Golarion has access to. Many nations are advanced forms of government like republics or have some system of parliament.

Androffa: No magic at all, the Androffans are capable of utilizing nanotechnology, interstellar travel, artificial intelligence, mind uploading, and so on. Government type is unknown, but we can assume some sort of federation of worlds.

Maybe pure coincidence, but it's an awfully interesting one. Also note that

** spoiler omitted **

Sometimes I wonder if Paizo actually has this all figured out or not.

Magic as a force of stasis is pretty much exactly the setup used in Dias Ex Machina's Amethyst:Revolution books.

Limited polymorph effect might work, since you'd want to have an adaption that would cover pressure effects as well. Another option would be to have more limited amulet of adaption for water to air, or for air to water, or water depth to deeper/shallower depths.

Another path, would be for such an amulet to activate latent psionic abilities to psychometabize an effect similar to adapt body at the cost of increased caloric intake to fuel each change (rules based or just flavour)

But here's the source of the disagreements: the game you're playing doesn't really require balanced rules -- in honesty, it doesn't really really and truly require any rules at all. In contrast, the games that I and Kolo and others would like to play do require reasonably well-balanced rules, which Pathfinder does not necessarily provide.

Conclusion 1: Pathinder is not the right game for us.
Observation 1: Pathfinder is a rules-heavy game that purports to be right for us.
Conclusion 2: We're playing it wrong. You're playing it right.
Observation 2a: The devs keep telling us that no one is wrong.
Observation 2b: Your style of play works equally well with any other game, or none at all.
Conclusion 3: Neither you nor we are doing anything wrong. Instead, the parts of the game that are supposed to be working for people like us aren't. They're meant to, but they're not.

That's bad. Sorry you aren't getting what you want from the game. But not caring about balance is not the same thing as not caring about rules at all. And questioning whether such an approach is "sane" or "useful" is a little on the side of "unnecessarily adversarial".

So, is the message you are trying to convey, is that if you care about balance in your roleplaying game, we should not look to purchase Pathfinder material?

An occultist makes for a pretty good villain. You can build it along a lot of different themes/styles and it tends to come with lots of roleplaying flavour/motivation built-in. The failed binding can also be a great way to have the influence of the spirits lead the occultist/binder down a particular path.

The best love to the rogue I've run across so far is the Glory Rogue from Rogue Glory and the Genius Guide to the Talented Rogue from Rogue Genius Games. Both do a good job of bringing love to the rogue without changing the class entirely.

I find balance to be only required in game where you have one clear winner and clear loser. So in Player vs Player game balance is important. In a game where the goal is not to win but create a story, develop the adventure, simulate a setting then balance is not important. The party works together and the wizard being able to move mountain while the fighter hack the bad guy in two is exciting. The Wizard dropping a mountain on the fighter and saying I win is not exciting.

The best love to the rogue I've run across so far is the Glory Rogue from Rogue Glory and the Genius Guide to the Talented Rogue from Rogue Genius Games. Both do a good job of bringing love to the rogue without changing the class entirely.

So, first off, I mean, don't just report the results of how your group did, because that is going to have all the usual problems with luck/lack of luck with the dice, but instead look at each of the parts of the scenario/module that interact or can interact with the mechanics you are testing and report what the odds of success are whenever a dice roll is called for with the builds you are using. They should also report if the class is able to significantly participate in the check or if they cannot.

The testers should also report where the new mechanics allow them to interact with the story, places where the GM had to fudge things a little to make them fit (this can be great anecdotal data to help flesh out examples in ability descriptions or maybe add another example on a table of possible skill uses).

Other useful data points are going to be how much a class depends on the other group members, are there any large achilles heels in the class or blindspots and to what degree the class is able to offer something new to the box of tools used for problem solving.

This is a rough framework and I'm sure it can be refined to be much better at organizing the questions/data collection, but it should also help minimize the usual issues of playtesting where the developers get a lot of unbalanced or misleading data or just less useful data because there's the guy who can make the commoner shine or the guy who can make the greatest blending of flavour and mechanics ever seem to be boring.

As for the simulated part, that is there because to do the mechanics heavy part of this analysis, you don't really need other people present. You can look at the target AC, saving throws, skill checks, range of skills required in the module and compare them against the sample build being used for testing the class. But, by comparing it to published modules you are working from a comparable baseline and it puts it into the language of the developers rather than the theorycrafters. Using the module also helps calibrate the theorycrafting because it lets the theories be put to the test of an actual module and helps refine the models used in the theorycrafting.

This is basically a stream of consciousness description of what I was thinking, but it roughly lines up with the evaluation/playtesting method used by some reviewers

Endzeitgeist wrote:

Step 1: I read the pdf/book. If the content is no utter wreck, I take the content with me to my group. At this stage, I usually have a dry analysis (avg damage, utility, etc.) done. Here, I do have target values – if you can out-nova psionics or sorcerors, there’s an issue, for example.

Step 2: If we’re NOT playing my main campaign, each player chooses one of the classes to playtest. S/he generates a character. I then proceed to run these characters through a module I wanted to playtest. I do this mainly because I think that scenarios à la “class xyz fights dragon in vacuum” do not represent how a class actually plays. Such tests provide an inkling, yes, but that’s about it. (See nova-issues et al.) Also: What fun is playing e.g. a super-duper-damage class that can’t do anything but squishing foes?

Step 3: I compare how the class fared with my analysis and ask my players how they experienced the class, both the player of the class and the rest.

Step 4 (optional): If all players agree that a certain content might benefit the main campaign, it is added for further in-depth playtesting. So yeah, that’s about it.

Why do I prefer this type of tests? Take IG’s Ethermancer – looked complex on paper, math was very hard to do, all day casting -> wasn’t sold. In actual game-play, the class fared much better and proved to be actually a fun addition that did not steal the thunder of the other classes while still contributing. Now my main campaign actually has one of these guys as a PC. The actual “how does it play”-experience is most important for me.

The key for me, is if Paizo/the players can come up with some good modules to use as testing templates, then the people who like to do the step one theorycrafting can also delve into some deeper analysis and review of how the classes actually handle in a game, without having to get a group of friends together. It should help increase the highly relevant participation in the playtesting.

It would also let players test out the mechanics at a broader range of levels (this will depend heavily on the choice of level appropriate modules, no level 1 dungeon crawling at level 18) and avoid the issues where Paizo doesn't have the time, or planning needed to properly review the mechanics design at all level ranges in semi-real world settings.

Like I think I've mentioned upthread, from watching the playtests, I get the impression that most theorycrafting feedback is largely disregarded, especially when it gets more complex. By putting the feedback into the module format, it will hopefully help the players get their message to Paizo more clearly and lead to a more useful playtest for all. With proper testing methodology setup, it shouldn't really take the playertests all that much longer than a normal detailed theorycrafting post either.

PFS makes a good test environment. You have a set of short adventures that everyone should be playing basically the same way (so there are no weird houserules that interfere or interact with) and you have the potential for a wide swath of possible race/class/etc. combinations and different people with different playstyles.

Of course, the Mythic playtest didn't use PFS.

-Skeld

I agree that PFS can be useful for testing. Another way to do it, would be to do a simulated run through a PFS adventure. The drawback of course, is that PFS does not handle the higher levels very well at all. What we really need are some very good high level modules that take into account the type of capabilities characters possess for the higher levels. I seem to remember the Mythic playtest having a sample mythic adventure, but I don't remember it being all that useful and a lot of it was tied up in the mythic trials system that was later revised.

Actually, to make this more constructive, do people have some modules they suggest to use as test candidates for the different level ranges?

The thing is, you don't actually need to sit down with other players to do what I posted. In it's core, all you are running is a same-game test with a variety of combat and non-combat challenges. You can take an average paizo adventure and look at the overall goals and individual goals and then model the probabilities of a character being able to achieve those goals. I'm not talking about one fight after another, but rather attempting to run through an adventure, maybe with a generic party, maybe solo.

Theorycraft is the analysis part. Playtesting is the calibration of the models used for the theorycraft. Maybe eventually, paizo/the players can develop some standardized suites of tests to help evaluate new content.

The big point I'm trying to get across, is I think that an argument that says "with x combination of class features/feats a character will have a Z% chance of success on circumstance X. Is this intended?"

For me, the larger glaring issue is not that people were aggressive in their criticism in the playtest segments. While its unfortunate that this type of feedback is typically ignored, being human, it's not all that surprising and I can't entirely blame a group of designers for reacting in that way. For many community-centric companies, special community managers are hired and there is a whole field of work based around good ways to get community feedback without it being a painful experience for all involved.

For me, the larger issue is that Paizo did not undertake the modeling/math checks I asked about in my original question that James Jacobs very kindly and forthrightly responded to:

me wrote:

I was wondering if there was any attempt to mathematically model expected damage outputs, initiative values, and other fairly basic "be good at your combat niche" type character building options? Things like probability of success, expected damage amounts, etc are all calculatable values. I've found the bestiary monster CR guidelines (how much HP, damage, etc you should expect for a monster of a certain CR) extremely valuable and I was wondering why it appears something similar wasn't done when developing this system.

The reason for this lack may be due to not having the required staff, not having basic design analysis/feedback procedures for this type of review, blind spots in the proto-typing/analysis/review/refinement process, or maybe other spots. The take-away for the players who want to participate in playtests is figuring out what format their analysis needs to be in for Paizo to receive the data and treat it with due consideration, rather than ignoring it. It appears the best way to do this is to do a mock-run of an adventure, post the results, and describe the probabilities of success along with an analysis as to where those success/failure rates come from when put up against something intended for that level of challenge. It's bit more work, but seems to do a better job of reaching the developers.

I guess they end up walking around with bags over their soul crystals. An interesting item for a Relluk might be something that makes the light from their crystals visible to only the Relluk and not visible to others, kind of like the thief's candle item from the Harry Potter books.

Another thing to consider is that light travels differently in the water and there may be other senses it is more important to conceal yourself from than sight.

Right, but the main take-away is that Paizo is not doing that type of testing themselves, so it is up to the players.

You do have a good point in much of it being in how Paizo responds to players and how players express themselves. Based on past playtests, it also appears that it needs to be couched in the terms of running a dungeon/adventure, rather than a numerical analysis that says with X capabilities, Y bonuses, the character has a success rate of Z%. And then comparing those success rates with what the target success rates might be. While there was a bunch of complaints about how he went about things, andreww's playtests for the Advanced Class Guide where he demonstrated an arcanist soloing multiple of the "harder" adventures and abusing some of the mechanics of the arcanist exploits appears to have led to changes in those exploits.

...I don't get how Paizo designers thought number inflation was the way to go for Mythic. Numbers were already too high in regular Pathfinder. Then they make them higher? And add only 30 to 50 hit points to the PCs. And maybe a 100 to the monsters. That is one or two uses of Foe-Biter or one or two crits with mythic power attack. How do game designers that get paid to do this fail to take into account the mathematical problems that such numbers cause for encounter design. I don't understand how they could have messed up the scaling so badly in mythic, when it is easy to calculate and see the problem.

Or did they truly intend on PCs and NPCs killing each other in one hit. So fights come down to win initiative and kill or lose initiative and die. I wasn't expecting that type of game...

James, there's something I'm curious about and I was hoping you might be able to shed light upon. Since many of the issues that have arisen with this AP are related to Mythic and the numbers underlying the system, I was wondering if there was any attempt to mathematically model expected damage outputs, initiative values, and other fairly basic "be good at your combat niche" type character building options? Things like probability of success, expected damage amounts, etc are all calculatable values. I've found the bestiary monster CR guidelines (how much HP, damage, etc you should expect for a monster of a certain CR) extremely valuable and I was wondering why it appears something similar wasn't done when developing this system.

Thanks for your responses in this thread and I look forward to seeing what you come up with next.

The problem is that there really wasn't a lot of good solid playtesting feedback for high tier, high level characters for us to work with. At least, as far as I saw. The high level Wrath of the Righteous adventures used the best feedback and material we had... but in large I felt increasingly like I was flying into the dark. There were SO many options available, and to a certain extent I kind of felt like the design team and the playtesters alike really focused more on character building than they did on actually building adventures or how to build long-term campaigns for Mythic. Which is sort of par for the course, it feels like... the higher level things get, the more they need playtesting, but the less folks seem interested in playtesting them.

In a way, Wrath of the Righteous IS the high-level mythic playtest. It's a shame that it's also the final product, I guess.

If I did this again, I'd be in a better place to develop a more well-balanced and well-made AP... but I'm not eager to do it again anytime soon. Which is too bad for me, since the type of story I wanted to tell with Wrath (facing off against demigods/etc.) is one I particularly like (it's the core of the 3 Dungeon APs we did, after all).

I just really think that Mythic sort of failed at one of its roles—to provide a solid play experience beyond 20th level, which is kind of what I wanted but, as it turns out, wasn't really exactly what came out of Mythic Adventures.

So, basically, Paizo didn't do any of the number crunching to test out the math and relied on the mythic playtest to catch any problems with the math. Additionally, it sounds like the playtesting for the Wrath of the Righteous campaign was pretty much non-existent. The long and short of it, is that for any future playtests, stress testing of the underlying math/system at all levels of play is extremely important. Whether or not that feedback will produce any changes (see Advanced Race Guide racial point system) is another thing, but at least Paizo will have been provided with the data since they don't seem to do any such rigorous testing themselves.

If you are trying to get down to core principles, you'd probably just want to determine the number of actions required for a character to take down a target CR opponent and how many actions that target CR opponent needs to take down the character. Expanding this into non-combat areas would turn it into more of a same game test, though in a non-combat situation capability to do lots of somethings would probably take precedence over economy of actions in most situations.

Instead of Full-Attacks, for combat I'd look at % chance of removing the target from being able to contribute to combat. You'd basically be looking at which side is able to reduce the other sides actions/round to zero first.

Vancian/Slot based casting is basically Yu-Gi-Oh. You have a deck of cards. You select your cards for the day, and then have a chance to spend those cards. You just have to hope that you've selected the correct set of cards for the challenges you encounter and that you have enough of each card. It's a conceptually interesting magic system, but not one that gets reflected in fantasy literature very often.

So, an interesting idea. Why doesn't a group take up the task of making an alternate powerpoint system for all casters? That way, these new psychics and anyone else can be powerpoint casters, but those that like Vancian casting (counting myself and I know many others) can have our cake too.